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Calendar competition: the winners

Earlier this year we asked our readers to send in photos showing how science and technology has affected their lives and the world around them. The best images made it into the New Scientist 2010 calendar. See the winners and runners-up here.

Winner – January

Bug Watch

A female European dwarf mantis
(Ameles spallanzania) rides a
wristwatch on the Croatian island of
Prviç.

At up to 3 centimetres long,
this type of dwarf mantis is not the
smallest of the more than 2000
known mantis species – that honour
goes to the 1-centimetre Bolbe
pygmaea – while the largest can
grow to 15 centimetres or more.
In captivity, the females of some
species such as the European or
praying mantis (Mantis religiosa)
have often been observed to kill
and eat the male during sex,
although it remains controversial
whether this deadly love bite is
commonly delivered in the wild.

The female dwarf mantis, for her
part, displays manners as dainty as
her form and always declines to
eat her mate.

(Image: Nikola Vlahov)

Winner – February

Float Like an Eagle

A feather floats serenely on water.
This image shows a body feather,
also known as a contour feather,
from an African fish eagle
(Haliaeetus vocifer) kept at the
International Centre for Birds of Prey
in Gloucestershire, UK. This feather
floated for days with no sign of
sinking.

Natural oils and its fine
structure make it highly water-repellent,
which is vital for the fish
eagle, as despite being a powerful
bird with a 2-metre wingspan it will
sometimes catch a catfish too heavy
for it to lift, so it must swim to
shore with its prey. Scientists are
studying feathers in the hope of
making new materials with similar
properties.

(Image: Linda Wright)

Winner – March

Synchronised Snacking

When Des Cannon saw what he
thought were caterpillars nibbling at
a silver birch tree in his garden in
Bray, Ireland, he moved in to flick
them off the leaves – and was
startled to see them all rearing up
at him in synchrony. This behaviour
is peculiar to larvae of the sawfly
family, in this case the birch sawfly.
It is named for the female’s
ovipositor, which looks like a saw
and is used to cut holes in plants
where she can lay her eggs, giving
them a measure of protection from
predators.

This synchronised behaviour is
probably aimed at warding off
predators too. It worked for this
larval display team at least, as Cannon decided to take their photo
instead of picking them off his tree.

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Winner – April

Ships of the Desert

On what was once the bed of the
Aral Sea, a shoal of camels shelters
from the sun under a pair of
redundant fishing boats. The Aral
Sea was the fourth largest inland
body of water in the world. In the
1960s the Soviet government
diverted water from two tributaries
of the Aral, the Amu Darya and Syr
Darya, to irrigate cotton fields. This
caused the sea to retreat
dramatically. It shrank to a salty
puddle, killing most aquatic life and
leaving behind tracts of polluted
desert.

For the northern part of the Aral
Sea, within Kazakhstan, there is
hope: the building of the 13-
kilometre-long Kok-Aral dam here
has allowed the sea to advance
again. But for the southern remnant
of the sea, which is mainly in poorer
Uzbekistan, the outlook remains dry
and bleak.

Winner – May

Sand Dollar

A young sea urchin of the species
Clypeaster subdepressus is seen in
polarised light. Less than a
millimetre across even with its
spines, the juvenile form shown
here has recently metamorphosed
from the free-swimming larval
stage and is beginning its new life
on the sea floor, consuming organic
material it scrapes from the surface
of sand grains. It will eventually
grow into a thick disc-shaped
creature 20 centimetres across,
known colloquially as a sea biscuit.

This and other disc-shaped urchins
are known as sand dollars. In 2008,
scientists at the University of
Washington discovered that the
larvae of one species of sand dollar,
Dendraster excentricus, can clone
themselves when at risk of
predation – presumably increasing
the chance that some larvae will
survive to enjoy a long adulthood of
sucking sand.

(Image: Bruno Vellutini)

Winner – June

Tunnel Vision

Raspberries and other soft fruit grow
under massed ranks of polythene
tunnels at the Scottish Crop
Research Institute just outside
Dundee, UK. The institute develops
new varieties of fruit, looking for
genes that mark desirable traits in
terms of taste, appearance and
resistance to disease.

Commercial growers use
polytunnels to pamper their fruit at
the risk of giving pests such as the
raspberry beetle the perfect
environment in which to thrive. A
new project at SCRI aims to foil this
particular pest by breeding
raspberries whose flowers lack
beetle-tempting chemicals in their
scent: the plants must smell
unattractive to beetles yet stay tasty
for humans.

Winner – July

Death in Bloom

The orchid mantis, Hymenopus
coronatus,waits for its next meal to
land. The mantis inhabits various
types of flower, and as each
individual grows its colouring
changes to resemble that of its
chosen bloom. So convincingly does
it blend in with the floral backdrop
that bees, wasps and flies attracted
to the orchid are unlikely to suspect
that this particular set of petals will
pounce on them.

During courtship, males of the orchid
mantis will tap their antennae and
forelegs against the females’ wings
to try to get their interest. This ritual
has been observed by insect
breeders, who seek out the orchid
mantis because of its beauty and
rarity.

(Image: Paul Wagner)

Winner – August

Stellar Starfish

A basket star (Astrocladus
euryale) perches on coral and
sifts the water for food. Like their
fellow echinoderms, including
urchins and sea cucumbers,
basket stars have five-fold
symmetry, but they elaborate on
this with their extraordinary
many-fingered arms, which are a
little like slender coral branches.
The arms are covered in mucus
and form a sticky net that is used
for filter-feeding, picking up
passing plankton and other
morsels.

Winner – September

Blade of Light

On an unusually still day, the tip of a
turbine blade catches the sun above
the snowy hills of Shetland in the
far north of the UK. Here at the
Burradale wind farm, the five
turbines – named Mina, Brenda,
Betsy, Sally and Karen – are among
the most productive in the world. In
2005 the average power they
generated was 57.9 per cent of
their maximum capacity, a record
for any wind farm.

A proposed new wind farm, which
would feature 200 huge turbines
and a capacity of 550 megawatts,
almost 200 times that of Burradale,
has proved controversial. Opponents
of the scheme object on the
grounds of its visual effect and the
damage they say it would do to
wildlife and carbon-storing peat
bogs. If the project goes ahead, an
undersea cable will carry the power
it generates to the mainland, more than 200 kilometres
away to the south.

(Image: William Spence)

Winner – October

Frond Memories

A young fern frond unfurls by the
side of a road in Herefordshire, UK.
With their delicately branching
form, akin to the recurring
geometric patterns of fractals, which
look similar at different scales, ferns
fascinated the Victorians.

During the 19th century many
amateur botanists collected ferns
and grew them in glass Wardian
cases, invented by one Nathaniel
Ward in the 1820s to maintain
humidity and keep out the pollution
that had choked ferns in his garden.
The craze was named
pteridomania, after the Latin name
of the plant group to which ferns
belong, Pteridophyta.

As any
pteridomaniac will tell you, the
unfurling style of leaf emergence
shown here, known as circinate
vernation, is characteristic of ferns.

(Image: Chris Coram)

Winner – November

Mystery Object

A deep-sea creature? A nerve cell?
An interstellar nebula? Nope. It is a
firework, exploding in the sky above
Cambridge, UK. The long exposure
captures the evolution of the
firework’s tracery, which is arguably
more beautiful than our ordinary
real-time view of pyrotechnics.
Perhaps the image gives us a gauzy
impression of what it might be like
to stand outside time and instantly
comprehend the four-dimensional
space-time of our universe in all its
glory. Then again, maybe it’s just a
pretty picture.

(Image: Nigel Cooke)

Winner – December

Frost Flair

Fern frost grows on a windowpane.
When the temperature outside drops
low enough to cool the inner surface of
the window below freezing point,
moisture indoors can turn directly to ice
on contact with the glass.

The first ice crystals tend to nucleate on
dirt, scratches or other imperfections in
the glass, so defining the first sketchy
outlines of the frost pattern. Narrow
fingers of ice gradually grow across the
window, with new crystalline
outgrowths forming side branches
which in turn give rise to yet more
branches, producing a fern-like pattern.
Changes in temperature and humidity
can switch the ice crystals from
growing in narrow spikes to forming
broader hexagonal “leaves”, and back
again.

This process also crafts the
intricate patterns of a snowflake.
Here, the image of a frosted
windowpane has been digitally
reflected to give it a four-fold
symmetry.

The following are all runners-up

Match Made in Heaven 3

"Took these about a year ago, just after buying a macro lens. I’m fascinated by everyday processes that we never get to see up close. I clamped matches in front of a black background, pre-focused, lit each with another match and snapped the results. I love them."

(Image: Stephen Sadler, UK)

Ladybug on top of a Moon Jellyfish

"A bewildered ladybug has found its way onto a common jellyfish on the east coast of Jutland, Denmark. Two widely different creatures in both colour and species. My fascination with the biological macro world at its best."

(Image: Mikkel Vind Lorez, Denmark)

Venus Transit

"The Venus transit is a rare phenomenon that was captured in this photograph taken at dawn on Boston's South Shore, 2004."

(Image: Thomas Miller, US)

Salar de Uyuni Sunrise

"The sun peaking over the horizon in the Salar de Uyuni in remote Bolivia, lighting up the hexagonal crystals. Shows how harsh nature can be, yet so elegant and beautiful at the same time."

(Image: Clint Burkinshaw, Australia)

Furry Spider

"A small spider on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada."

(Image: Damon Clarke at MacroPhotography.com, Canada)

Condom

(Image: Richard Thomas, UK)

Landscape, Tajikistan

"The Khaburabot pass at 3252 metres in the Pamir mountains in the autonomous republic of Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan, in spring."

(Image: Nick Hannes, Belgium)

My Chubby Caterpillar

"One of the reasons I take the photos I do is to share something people haven't seen or considered. We have all seen a caterpillar, but few of us have been close enough to really consider them as marvels of nature. I took this photo at a science museum in North Carolina because it brought me the same amusement and wonder that brought me to a career in science."

(Image: Paul Wagner, US)

Stars above the Bridge

"Ayub and Lansdowne Bridges connected Sukkur with rest of Pakistan. Lansdowne was constructed in late 19th century by the British for crossing the mighty Indus river. The beautiful, arched Ayub bridge was constructed in the 1960s. Having no pillars, once these bridges were unique engineering marvels."

(Image: Agha Waseem Ahmed, Pakistan)

Racing with the Moon

"Today's technological advancement is largely indebted to the industrial revolution, and at the heart of the industrial revolution was steam power. Yesterday's steam locomotives once accelerated technological progress and then went into oblivion. This steam loco is stationed at Sukkur, Sindh, Pakistan."

(Image: Agha Waseem Ahmed, Pakistan)

Event Horizon

"A frog leaping out of a pond producing waves while in the eye of the whirl. It appeared to me as if the frog was jumping away from the gravitational field of a black hole."

(Image: Agha Waseem Ahmed, Pakistan)

Alien in the Bedroom

"Simple image-processing techniques such as stacking and stitching are making it easier for a layman or amateur scientist to make valid contributions to the scientific community in areas such as microscopy or astronomy by producing images that were not possible a shot time ago. A common zebra jumping spider is shot using multiple images that have been combined to remove the shallow depth of focus that would normally obscure viewing such small subjects in their entirety."

(Image: Tim Evison, Denmark)

Oil on Water

"This photo was taken at the La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, in May 2008. The tar pits are a natural oil seep with oil coming to the surface throughout the park, both directly through the soil and in water features. These tar pits became the resting place for unlucky prehistoric animals, including mammoths, sabre-tooth cats and wolves. Here, a thin layer of oil lies on top of a pond. Light waves reflected from the top surface of the thin film of oil interfere with light waves reflected from the bottom surface, producing the colourful pattern seen at the surface, beautiful and deadly."

(Image: Helen Brand, Australia)

Mandelbrot Drop

"An attempt to show two amazing things in one: first the brilliance of a Mandelbrot fractal, the second that the tiniest droplet of water can refract an amazing image, even when dripping from your tap."

(Image: Chris Cupit, UK)

Fluorescent Polyps

"This image is an aquatic macro shot showing several different kinds of Zoanthus colonial anemone polyps. The image is taken in pitch darkness using a special technique which stimulates and captures just the fluorescent pigmentation within the anemones."